Conventionally, a collection of triangles is rasterized to cause a three-dimensional graphical object to be rendered on a display screen of a computing device. Specifically, a three-dimensional object rendered on the display screen can be represented as a collection of triangles, wherein density of the triangles can vary based upon an amount of detail that is desirably shown to a viewer. Generally, the density of the triangles must be high enough so as to allow the viewer to be able to ascertain the shape of the object. Each triangle may also be associated with data pertaining to texture that can indicate how an image is to be mapped to the triangle (to provide the triangle with some form of texture). Once the collection of triangles is assembled to represent the three-dimensional object, vertices of the triangles can be manipulated to cause the object to be displayed at a particular viewing perspective. For example, for each frame shown on the display screen, there is a camera position that defines the perspective of the three-dimensional object.
After the vertices of the triangle are placed in three-dimensional space in accordance with the camera position, the triangles are rasterized. That is, the triangles are mapped from three-dimensional space to the two-dimensional display screen through utilization of, for instance, a view perspective matrix. Values corresponding to the triangles are interpolated such that they correspond to certain pixels on the display screen. Thereafter, a pixel shader program can be utilized to assign colors to pixels, thereby rendering the three-dimensional object on the display screen.
The above-mentioned actions are typically undertaken by graphical processing units (GPUs), which have substantial parallel computing capabilities. To take advantage of such parallel computing capabilities, however, the triangles used to model three-dimensional objects must correspond to a certain number of pixels (10-20 pixels), as the hardware of GPUs can perform computation on the certain number of pixels simultaneously. If the number of pixels per triangle becomes too small, the parallel computing powers of the GPU are not sufficiently utilized in connection with rendering the three-dimensional object on a display screen.